This addition to our Digital Bookshelf series is one that I, a newbie to the Digital Humanities field, read to familiarize myself with the subject. DH is a fairly new and complex, multi-faceted area so when joining Artes Research team as an intern, I knew that I wanted to learn more about how it relates to my previous experience studying and working within the history field. Before reading The Digital Humanities Coursebook: Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship by Johanna Drucker, I expected a focus on just that: research and scholarship. While this book certainly focuses on the technicalities and approaches of DH, I was very pleased to find that there was a great emphasis on its application to the cultural heritage sector and, more specifically, museums. The potential for this book to be used in an interdisciplinary context makes it valuable not only to students within a DH program, but also to students, researchers, and teaching staff in humanities disciplines where traditional methods still remain the norm.

The layout and structure of the book are easy to follow and emphasize practice in conjunction with conceptual understandings. Broken up into bite-sized pieces within overarching themes, it is comprehensive without being too ambitious. Drucker starts from zero in each chapter, introducing the foundation and background of each concept thoroughly. From there, she takes time to contextualize these methods by providing ample examples that are relevant to DH from a historical and contemporary frame of reference. This largely comes in the form of exercises.

These exercises follow each section and provide an opportunity for the reader to engage with the explored topic immediately. Perhaps this addition should be expected in such a work, but speaking as a student who has rarely seen this within the humanities field, this attention to the reader appears to acknowledge the reader’s previous and potential grasp of the subject; decisions like this can and should encourage students to continue learning the material. The exercises were engaging and not mindless problems to be solved. Some of these exercises ask the reader to refer to secondary sources, such as exercise #2 in subsection “Cultural Analytics, multi-modal communication, media, and audio mining”:

“Examine the project by Tanya Clement, Hipstas “John A. Lomax and Folklore Data.” What are the ways in which these folklore files from the early 20th century become more useful as a result of the digital interventions? What other kinds of materials do you think would benefit from such research? https://hipstas.org/2015/05/11/john-a-lomax-and-folklore-data/”

Other exercises, such as exercise #3 in subsection “Web presentation formats,” are meant as self-reflections for a student actively involved in a DH project:

“What are the assets you have digitized and how are they organized, described, and named? How will they be used and how much flexibility do you want in your site? Should scholars be able to access the entire set of assets, or only see them in the interpretive frameworks you have created?”

By providing exercises that engage students in different stages of their projects – from research to reflection – the book acts loosely as an instruction book. While some examples are specific, such as the aforementioned exercise #2, other exercises give grounds for a more personalized application of the text.

Several aspects covered in the book stood out to me for their connection to museums, with the most notable being databases, visualizations, and virtual restoration. Having worked on or dealt with these elements in the past, I did not realize at the time that I was engaging with DH methods. In the following paragraphs, I will go into more detail about my experience reading these sections and the points that stood out or made a strong impact on me.

When reading the discussion on the nature of museum databases, I was initially surprised to learn that my taking measurements of accessions and plugging them into PastPerfect, the collection management software, was creating data. To me, this was purely museological protocol and removed from any larger discipline. It was also something done out of an obligation for preservation and for the museum’s personal records. Learning about data creation in this sense has helped me understand that the purpose of certain processes, such as creating structured metadata, transcends internal museological means; cultural heritage materials and their data are used in hackathons, Linked Open Data, independent research, and so much more.

Another important aspect that the book underlines is accessibility when it comes to cultural heritage materials. When we think of accessibility, we commonly think of increasing it, but on the other hand, we also need to consider the ethical implications of sensitive data. The book discusses cases when cultural heritage materials should not be made available to the public. Referencing the Mukurtu platform, an open-source platform for indigenous peoples, Drucker says that:

 “Within many cultures, what can be accessed depends upon the role, class, position, age, or gender of individuals—or the caste or kinship group to which they belong. Taking such considerations into account with regard to data means shifting one’s assumptions away from a single approach and recognizing the degrees of granularity that might need to be built into control of data retrieval, access, or use.”

As most of us have not had the opportunity to work in a cultural heritage institution, we might not be familiar with the intricacies of the ethical context concerning data sharing.  One of the primary concerns of the cultural heritage sector is respecting cultural traditions and memory, thus, the concept of “degrees of granularity” when it comes to data sharing and publishing is a helpful device for those in the sector and for students hoping to secure a career in this sector in the future.

Turning to the discussion on visualizations and virtual restorations, in addition to providing a very thorough introduction to the various types of visualizations and modeling, Drucker also delves deeper, opening a critical discussion about what these approaches offer, but also what the limitations are. Through it all, she emphasizes that digital restorations have brought new opportunities to scholars of built heritage.

Given the cost and time of these visualizations, creators have frequently had to defend the logic of their work. One pioneering modeling project, a 1998 project on Pompeii, asserted that while a visual model cannot recover original experiences, they can be used to prove or disprove hypotheses. Initially finding it interesting that such a point even needs to be explicitly made, it emphasized to me how DH is constantly battling criticism from traditional humanities; issues of virtual accuracy vs material accuracy, sustainability methods, and more are constant concerns. Drucker offers a partial counter to this saying that even still, “our agendas change over time.” Even though a visualization or virtual restoration might not be entirely without flaws or creative freedom, historians and other professionals are working with the knowledge and material they have at that exact given time, just as at any other time in history when creating a narrative.

Books like this are valuable to the DH community and beyond. When studying history for my bachelor’s degree, I would constantly hear students’ concerns of “I don’t know what to do with my degree” and would frequently be asked the age-old question directed toward humanities students “So… you want to teach?” Not many students know of the potential in the DH field, but by incorporating books such as Drucker’s into humanities curricula, opportunities open up for different types of jobs, interdisciplinary research, and more.  As digital humanities becomes more established and engrained in traditional arts curricula, its complexities might feel out of reach and unfamiliar for some students. Without this exposure and challenge of DH, however, the full potential of students in the cultural heritage field remains unrealized. This book is one example of a tool that can bridge students of traditional humanities backgrounds over to DH as they develop the skills they need to push the limits of what can be done with cultural heritage and humanities data.

Johanna Drucker. The Digital Humanities Coursebook : An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. Routledge, 2021.

Research data management (RDM) is as old as research itself. Scholars across the centuries have developed ways to organize and preserve the materials they work with. In today’s age of seemingly boundless technological possibilities, tool options, and ideas, more and more funders and institutions are outlining formal requirements around RDM to help overwhelmed researchers find their way to the latest best practices in handling data.

These requirements aren’t always experienced as helpful, of course. The lingo of RDM can sound alien; data management plan (DMP) templates don’t always align with recognizable research practices in different disciplines; tools for proper RDM are sometimes missing; and so on. These problems are (almost) as annoying for research support librarians like myself as they are for researchers themselves.

In moments of frustration, I like to go back to this 2015 video by data librarian Kristin Briney about the possibilities of RDM. Enjoy fifteen minutes of data inspiration:

To see or download the transcript, go to Rethinking research data on YouTube, click the three dots under de video next to “Save”, and click on “Show transcript” (detailed instructions).

Abstract:

The United States spends billions of dollars every year to publicly support research that has resulted in critical innovations and new technologies. Unfortunately, the outcome of this work, published articles, only provides the story of the research and not the actual research itself. This often results in the publication of irreproducible studies or even falsified findings, and it requires significant resources to discern the good research from the bad. There is way to improve this process, however, and that is to publish both the article and the data supporting the research. Shared data helps researchers identify irreproducible results. Additionally, shared data can be reused in new ways to generate new innovations and technologies. We need researchers to “React Differently” with respect to their data to make the research process more efficient, transparent, and accountable to the public that funds them.

Find more articles, resources, and general interesting stuff in the Artes Digital Scholarship Community on Zotero.

Kamposiori, Christina, Claire Warwick, and Simon Mahony. “Embedding Creativity into Digital Resources: Improving Information Discovery for Art History.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 469–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab088. 

In the Digital Bookshelf series, the Artes Research team shares with our readers an academic work we have been enjoying recently. This time, I’ve chosen a recently published article co-authored by Christina Kamposiori, Claire Warwick, and Simon Mahony. The article, titled “Embedding Creativity into Digital Resources: Improving Information Discovery for Art History,” takes an ethnographic approach to examining how art historians find and engage with their resources. It builds on established research on information behavior models and contributes to these on the basis of the authors’ own ethnographic research, including not only interviews with but also observations of twenty art historians’ physical and digital workspaces.

The article’s focus is two-fold: first, it lays out the methodology and results of the ethnographic research, arguing that art historical research is a creative practice; and secondly, it suggests what an ideal digital platform for this target group might look like based on the results from the ethnographic study. In this way, it brings together insight not only from the art historians who participated in the interviews and observation process—a group with varied research experience and research interests—but also from the authors’ own areas of expertise as Digital Humanities scholars.

Based on their interactions with art historians, the authors draw the conclusion that there is often an element of serendipity related to research in the field of art history, particularly in the beginning stages of gathering resources and finding inspiration. By relying on existing information behavior models like Carol Kuhlthau’s Information Search Model (ISP), the authors make the case for a broader conception of the gathering phase in this model, incorporating “Exploratory Gathering” as a distinct phase. This type of information acquisition is part of what the authors argue is a “creative” practice germane to art historical research, and as such, it should be taken into account when designing digital platforms and resources.[1]

The article puts forth a number of considerations for developing such resources: (1) the interface should be easy to use and should facilitate multiple search methods; (2) the platform should enable visual exploration, including the ability to get an overview of the resources, but also linking resources in a way that lets users jump to similar content; (3) it should incorporate intuitive interaction like zooming or flipping through pages; (4) it should include metadata alongside digital materials; and (5) it should enable access through various means, including viewing and downloading material.

This article was interesting for me for multiple reasons, including its consideration of how accessibility of materials affects research focus and outcomes, the differences between objects in their digitized and physical forms, how libraries can better feature their digital materials, and how researchers in the digital age grapple with the amount of information within (or without of) their reach. These aspects of the article resonate with much of the work Artes Research does, especially in the context of teaching the Digital Scholarship module for the first-year PhD candidates at the Faculty of Arts. A key focus of the article, even though it remains implicit, relates to research data management and how this can be successfully incorporated into the (creative) research process in an iterative way. Indeed, the notion of “serendipity” can be relevant for many researchers in the humanities and for all who are researching in the digital age but remaining critical about how we access sources and what impact the medium of the resource might have on our results is also a worthy consideration.

The authors are transparent about the fact that the recommendations for building ideal platforms remain quite general, but they offer a starting point and some good practices for further development. It would be interesting to know which platforms specifically the authors examined in arriving at their conclusions and which, if any, they consider to be already-existing ideal platforms. The issues they raise about critical thinking when it comes to sources incorporated in research as well as the need to include researchers in the development of such digital infrastructure are central and will remain so in the future. In this way, the article provides several key considerations for researchers, library professionals, and digital humanists alike.

[1] Christina Kamposiori, Claire Warwick, and Simon Mahony, “Embedding Creativity into Digital Resources: Improving Information Discovery for Art History,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 476, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab088.